Chapter 2 - THE FORGED SIGNATURES
The police officer held the manila folder up to the flashing red and blue lights of his cruiser.
Mason, my thirty-two-year-old cousin who had always claimed to be a struggling real estate agent, was pressed against the side of the police car. His face was pale and slick with sweat. He wouldn’t look at me.
“Mr. Bradley,” the officer said, shining his flashlight onto the thick stack of papers inside the folder. “Is this your signature?”
I stepped closer, leaving Amy and Frederick safely sitting in the back of my locked SUV. I looked down at the documents. It was a transfer of deed for my home in Nashville. The home I had spent six years saving for. The home where I had carried Amy across the threshold.
At the bottom of the page, my signature was perfectly rendered in black ink. Right next to it was Amy’s signature.
“No,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “I never signed that. Neither did my wife.”
My mother, sitting handcuffed in the back of the second police cruiser, kicked the door from the inside.
“It’s my house!” Teresa screamed through the cracked window. “I paid for the groceries! I paid for the baby’s crib! I have a right to my share!”
I stared at her through the glass. For months, I had been sending her three thousand dollars a month because she claimed she was using it to help Amy. Now, the truth was staring me in the face. She wasn’t just stealing my money; she was trying to steal the roof over my son’s head.
“It’s a quitclaim deed,” the officer explained, flipping to the second page. “They were trying to transfer the ownership of your property into a trust. A trust controlled by your mother and your cousin.”
I looked at Mason. “How long have you been planning this?”
Mason swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward my mother in the cruiser. “Connor, man, listen to me. Your mom said you agreed to it. She said you were having financial trouble at the construction firm and needed to protect the house from creditors. I was just processing the paperwork!”
“You’re a liar,” I said, taking a step toward him. The officer put a hand on my chest to hold me back. “You were sneaking out the back gate with the original deed while the police were distracted. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
The officer closed the folder. “We’re taking them both in for suspected fraud and trespassing. You’ll need to come down to the precinct tomorrow to file a formal statement, Mr. Bradley.”
I watched as the cruisers drove away, taking my mother and cousin into the dark.
The house was completely silent now. The twenty relatives who had been feasting on expensive seafood and mocking my wife had scattered like roaches the moment the police arrived, leaving behind a trashed living room and a kitchen full of dirty dishes.
I walked back to my SUV and opened the back door.
Amy was holding Frederick against her chest. The baby’s fever had finally started to break after I gave him the medicine I kept in the car’s emergency kit. Amy looked up at me, her eyes red and swollen.
“Connor,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Are they gone?”
“They’re gone,” I said, reaching in to gently brush a strand of hair from her face. “They’re never coming back into this house, Amy. I promise you.”
We walked back inside. The smell of the party—stale beer, expensive perfume, and cooked crab—made my stomach turn.
Amy sat on the edge of the sofa, clutching Frederick. She looked around the ruined room, and then she looked down at the floor.
“Connor,” Amy said softly. “Your mother didn’t just forge the deed.”
I stopped picking up the empty beer bottles. “What do you mean?”
Amy reached into the pocket of her faded jeans. Her hand was shaking as she pulled out a small, heavy object. She held it out to me.
It was a thick, antique brass key.
“She forced me to clean your home office today,” Amy explained, tears finally spilling over her cheeks. “She told me I was useless and needed to earn my keep. But while I was sweeping under your desk, I found this key hidden taped beneath the bottom drawer. It has a tag on it.”
I took the key. Attached to it was a faded yellow tag with a set of numbers written in my mother’s handwriting.
“I didn't know what it was,” Amy cried. “But when she saw me holding it, she panicked. She grabbed my arm so hard it bruised. She said if I ever told you about this key, she would take Frederick away from me.”
I looked at the brass key, my heart pounding in my chest.
It wasn't a house key. It was a safety deposit box key for the local downtown bank.
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But what made my blood run cold was the name written on the back of the yellow tag. It wasn’t my mother’s name.
It was the name of my father, who had died fifteen years ago.
